The Actuarial Use of Health Service Indicators and Projections fo Health Service Expenditures in Croatia

The level of future health service expenditure is one of the most important issues in planning and calculating contributions for social health insurance and premiums in private health insurance. Working without knowing trends in health expenditures and utilisation of health care, or misjudgement of those trends, could cause serious problems in conducting the business of the state health insurance funds and especially in private insurance companies. Therefore it is useful to build a model for projecting future health service expenditures and risk cost per insured person.

Based on the data in the National Health Service reports for the past periods, and assumptions about future trends, it is possible to project future health service performance. Overall health care expenditures depend on the two basic parameters: the price of the health care service and the utilisation of health services. Both parameters depend on a lot of subparameters and some of the subparameters, for example organization of health care provision, introduction of new methods of treatment, appearance of new diseases, cannot be predicted for the long term. It leads us to make sensitivity tests of the stochastic model in respect of changes of the assumed parameters.

The model is based on the data of the Croatian National Institute of Public Health and other Croatian statistics.

KEYWORDS: health care, health expenditures, stochastic modelling, Monte Carlo method